


The Story of Balthazar Jones

by thealpacalypse



Category: Lovely Little Losers, Nothing Much to Do
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Nonbinary Balthazar, Nonbinary Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-30 07:22:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5155220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thealpacalypse/pseuds/thealpacalypse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Balthazar is five when he first wants to wear a skirt and doesn’t understand why his parents won’t let him. They tell him it’s not proper, he’s a boy and boys don’t wear skirts, but it doesn’t really make that much sense. But if his parents say it, he supposes they’re right, they’re grown-ups and as far as Balthazar knows, grown-ups are always right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Story of Balthazar Jones

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this months ago and posted it on tumblr, but only now I realized that I never actually uploaded it here.
> 
> Nonbinary Balthazar Jones is everything and I'm still forever grateful to who ever came up with this headcanon.

Balthazar is five when he first wants to wear a skirt and doesn’t understand why his parents won’t let him. They tell him it’s not proper, he’s a boy and boys don’t wear skirts, but it doesn’t really make that much sense. But if his parents say it, he supposes they’re right, they’re grown-ups and as far as Balthazar knows, grown-ups are always right.

Balthazar is six when he finds his mom’s lipstick in the bathroom and he puts it on just for fun. He’s seen his mom use it a million times, but when he tries it for himself, it’s actually a lot harder than it looks. He smiles when he looks in the mirror then, his lips a soft pink, but his smile falters when his mom walks in and yells at him for twenty minutes straight.

Balthazar is seven when he realizes that music is his best friend. When he plays music, his parents are proud of him, when he plays music, he’s proud of himself, he feels safe, he loves it. He doesn’t have to be anyone when he sits in front of a piano, he just plays and the music fills him up and he is happy.

Balthazar is eight when a group of stupid boys laugh at him because he can’t play football. “What are you, a girl?” they ask to mock him and for the first time Balthazar realizes that being a girl is somehow supposed to be a bad thing. He doesn’t know what to reply to that question.

“You’re such a girl,” Balthazar hears again when he’s nine, because somebody shoved him and he’s crying. He doesn’t get it, why can’t he cry? Why does crying make him a girl? He’s pretty sure the boy who said that is just stupid, but somehow it still makes Balthazar think. He knows he likes girl stuff and he has learned long ago that he’s not supposed to, so what if the boy is right? How would that even be possible?

When he’s ten, Balthazar becomes friends with Ursula. She’s super cool and amazing and yells at people who bully him. Not that he really gets bullied, not that it really matters, but it feels great that somebody stands up for him. Ursula is very much like music – Balthazar can just be himself around her, he doesn’t have to pretend to be anyone else.

At eleven, Balthazar makes his mom cry. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” she sobs when he asks for a dress for his birthday, “you’re too old for those childish games, Stanley, just stop!” And Balthazar gets it – his mom thinks there’s something wrong with him. Balthazar himself is sure by now that there’s something wrong with him. He never mentions it again.

Balthazar is twelve when he gets paired with Pedro Donaldson for a science project. Turns out that Pedro is not exactly keen on science, he just wants to talk about girls. “And which girls do you like?” Pedro asks and Balthazar frowns. “Well, Ursula is my best friend,” he replies, but Pedro shakes his head. “No, I mean, who do you think is the prettiest?” Balthazar considers for a moment. “Hero Duke is beautiful,” he says then and blushes. Of course Pedro notices and asks: “Oooohh, do you love her? Do you want to kiss her?” Balthazar shakes his head, he can’t even imagine that kind of stuff.  _No, I want to be as pretty as her_ , he thinks but never says.

He tells Ursula about all this when he’s thirteen. He never wanted to tell anyone ever again, not since he made his mom cry, but he feels so horrible about this sometimes, and he needs to get it out. “I’m not a boy, I don’t think,” he tells her, because he still doesn’t have the right words for it, won’t have them for years. Ursula is calm and smiles and hugs him. When Balthazar nervously asks her about makeup, she sits him down and gives him a makeover, mascara and eye shadow and lip gloss and when they both look into the mirror afterwards, Balthazar feels a bit strange, but still happy.

When he falls in love with Pedro, he wonders if that explains everything. He doesn’t know any gay people, but maybe that’s just how being gay feels like. Some boys at school have exchanged the word “girly” with “gay” by now, but it still means the same thing. So, even though they’re mean, maybe they’re right. Maybe this is what’s going on. Balthazar feels so terrible that he cries almost every night.

He learns about the word “transsexual” when he’s fifteen. It somehow makes sense, he thinks when he sits in front of the computer in his dark room. The website says stuff like “feeling like you’re born ‘in the wrong body’” and “unhappy about your sex”. It only gets more confusing when he gets to the part about trans girls hating their ‘male body’ and wanting operations to get rid of all the parts that make them look male – because it’s nothing like that for Balthazar. His body may not be the best, but he doesn’t hate it. So he can’t be transsexual, right? It makes him all the more miserable.

Ursula gets him a cute skirt for his sixteenth birthday. It’s a simple one, short and black with white polka dots. Balthazar loves her for it, but he can’t get himself to wear it. He’s not a girl, he doesn’t want to be a girl, he knows that by now, so he shouldn’t wear skirts. He hates himself so much that day that he almost wants to hurt himself. He doesn’t and later he will be glad about it, but right now he feels like the shittiest person alive. Ursula notices how miserable he looks and wants to apologize for giving him the skirt, but Balthazar won’t let her. “No, I love the skirt, really,” he reassures her, but he also tells her that he has buried it deep down in his closet, because he can’t deal with it right now. She doesn’t understand, but she accepts it and loves him anyway, and that’s what keeps Balthazar going.

So much happens in the next year that Balthazar doesn’t really think about all this for a while. First Bea turns their lives upside down, then Pedro is definitely flirting with him, or maybe not, and then everything goes to shit and Hero supposedly dies and Pedro comes out as bi. Then there’s all this tension between Pedro and him and first it’s good, but then it just gets too much and everything is not as Balthazar has expected, and then they’re finishing school and they don’t have time for anything anymore, and Balthazar is not really happy, but he’s okay.

Balthazar is eighteen when he first learns about nonbinary genders. The word “nonbinary” is just there, suddenly, on his computer screen, when he scrolls through Damian’s blog. “I’m pansexual, which means I’m attracted to male, female and nonbinary people,” it says there in the introduction of the blog and Balthazar doesn’t understand at first, but spends the next four hours on the internet, reading everything he can get his hands on.

He reads about demiboys and demigirls, about fluid genders and bigender people as well as pangender and agender ones, about the term genderqueer, and he reads so many stories of people who identify as nonbinary. Stories of people who felt broken all their lives. Of people who didn’t understand what was going on with them and who hated themselves for it, or people who never really hated themselves and one day just noticed that hey, they weren’t cis – and yeah, Balthazar learns about the word cis as well.

He begins to cry at some point and doesn’t really notice, and his tears are all about joy and relief and the overwhelming feeling that he’s not alone, he never has been, he’s okay, he will be fine. He texts Ursula, even though it’s the middle of the night, and the next morning when she comes over to his house, he tells her everything he has learned and cries some more, and she hugs him and kisses his cheek and tells him she loves him. They find the polka dotted skirt Balthazar got from Ursula and Balthazar wears it for the rest of the day, and even though they’re just in his room the whole time, it’s the best feeling in the world. He supposes he should tell his other friends. He should tell Pedro probably, considering how things are between them these days (but then again Balthazar isn’t sure how exactly things between them are), and at one point he might even tell his parents – maybe not, though, and Ursula reassures him that it’s completely up to him.

Balthazar tells the group one night before they all leave for university. He’s surprised how little courage it actually takes and how glad he is to be able to say this. Bea seems thrilled and asks him if he wants different pronouns or a different name now (he’s not sure about the pronouns yet though). Hero smiles kindly and offers him to go shopping with her whenever he wants. Ben cracks a stupid joke, claps him on the back and tells him: “Well, when you said you had to tell us something important, I feared that you might’ve had your big musical breakthrough and wouldn’t move to Wellington with us, so this is much better.” Pedro isn’t even surprised, he just nods and mumbles: “It doesn’t really change anything, right? For – all of us?” Balthazar is not entirely sure what that’s supposed to mean, so he slowly says: “Well… I don’t like to be called a boy or male, but other than that – not really.” Pedro’s eyes seem to have asked a completely different question though, but Balthazar doesn’t get it, so he tears his eyes away.

Balthazar is almost nineteen when he sits in a bath tub with a bath cap on, joking around with his flat mate. Ben is weird and Balthazar is completely ramble-y, but they’re having fun and it distracts Balthazar from the fact that living in a flat with Peter might have been the worst idea ever. And when Ben corrects himself and refers to him as a “washer-person”, it’s just this one tiny detail, this one insignificant change – but it means the world to Balthazar.

For the first time ever he thinks the thought out loud, clear in his head: “I’m nonbinary. I’m happy.”


End file.
